#1
When the parent of an obviously mentally unstable young man tells friends and colleagues "do not turn your back on my son" ....but takes her mentally unstable son to a shooting range for "bonding" and weapons familiarization, what might one expect? Sorry, I believe we may have had more than one candidate for mental instability.

#2
She did seem to be a little .. strange, didn't she. But I certainly would not blame her.

The problem here is a simple one, though the solution is not. The problem: a small but real number of people have chronic paranoid schizophrenia. They're born with it and have certain genetic and environmental cues that allow it to develop. It's a disease that takes a while to manifest itself, and the full manifestations come when a young man/woman is in their late teens / early twenties. They enter a spiraling cascade of worsening psychosis. For some, that leads to escalating violence.

I don't know the young man, of course, and I don't have his medical record handy. But my one-thousand-mile-away diagnosis is that.

Addendum at 0800 CT: some have said that Mr. Lanza had some sort of 'autism-spectrum disorder' that eventually decompensated, and that's why he went on his murderous rage. That's certainly possible, but I know that schizophrenia, particularly in children and teens, is frequently mis-diagnosed as something else. But I'll be corrected by whatever finally comes out about Mr. Lanza's medical history.

Second that. A friend has a brother who has late onset schizophrenia. The family is at their wit's end as to what to do. He's not legally crazy. Maybe the only thing he hasn't done is take his prescribed medicine. We have a kid in the neighborhood that everyone thinks is a ticking time bomb. The police say they can't do anything until he does something! There is a balance of trying to protect these people (ensure their fundamental Constitutional rights) but also protect society from them. As the writer says, we don't want to turn things over to the government because of a past track record. We don't want bureaucrats to lower the threshold for placing people in the loony bins so that eventually people are sent to the loony bin who are troublesome, inconvenient or speak out against the government. Generally, politicians simplify the problem by going after guns. They have done little to address the real problems other than provide knee-jerk reactions and try to get a lot of TV face time.

#2
An article by Thomas Hargrove, Scripts Howard News Service appeared in our local newspaper this a.m. : Link. They did an analysis of mass murders and homicides from 1980-2011. His conclusions: mass murders remained about constant over that period at about 32 mass murders (>4 murders), homicides were halved over that period. The halving of homicides seems to have occurred about the time period when concealed carry laws were enacted in the States. I suppose this association could be teased out of the data by State but coffee beckons. I did not realize that all murders are not reported to the FBI which would make things a bit more difficult.

#3
Good observation by Wretchard. He follows his usual habit of leaving the obvious unsaid as a cue to his commenters: if crazy white boys can cause so much mayhem, what would happen when the sane ones get p*ssed off?

#4
...why do you think they keep reminding people about 19th Century colonialism. The judas goats of the Left have been trying to undermine that capability by instituting multiculturalism (see - Great Britain).

Aspergers and autism are not forms of mental illness; they are neurodevelopmental disorders or disabilities. Autism is a lifelong condition that manifests before the age of 3; most mental illnesses do not appear until the teen or young adult years. Medications rarely work to curb the symptoms of autism, but they can be indispensable in treating mental illness like obsessive-compulsive disorder, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.

Underlying much of this misreporting is the pernicious and outdated stereotype that people with autism lack empathy. Children with autism may have trouble understanding the motivations and nonverbal cues of others, be socially naïve and have difficulty expressing their emotions in words, but they are typically more truthful and less manipulative than neurotypical children and are often people of great integrity. They can also have a strong desire to connect with others and they can be intensely empathetic  they just attempt those connections and express that empathy in unconventional ways.

The end of the Mayan calendar is the beginning of the end caused by global warming. Saturday, the oceans will begin to rise (noticeably!) and the north pole will melt, forcing Santa to borrow the USS Enterprise for his floating workshop.

#7
While soldering on a bum graphics card yesterday, it occurred to me that what the Mayans foresaw was the simultaneous explosion of every cheap-ass, low-rent, melamine-filled Chinese capacitor in electronic devices everywhere, bringing modern civilization to its knees.

Either that or the Mayans figured that making a calender for the next five millennia was enough to last for a while and they would finish it up later.

A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.

Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.

Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.